Columns, pieces and posts

The other day, after a column on the good and bad of 2013, I got a letter from a reader named Arthur Blair, who felt I’d left out something important. “I believe that just being alive is still the best thing of any year.” I wrote back and told him that funnily enough, after noting in the column that every year has something to recommend it, I’d written “We’re here, we’re alive, made it through another year.” I cut it from the first draft for space. It was obvious enough that it didn’t have to be said.

But sometimes obvious things don’t get said, or said enough.

Mr. Blair shared the experience that had sharpened his appreciation for the simple fact of being here. In August, 1950 he was a young US soldier fighting the war in Korea. It was tough pretty much from the minute he got there. “I spent a long afternoon being shot at and grenaded by a North Korean about thirty feet from where I was lying on the ground and he was in a foxhole. Obviously I lived through that day by the grace of God, and I have considered every day since than as a gift from God.” He went on to serve in Vietnam and spent fourteen years on the faculty at West Point.

Not every day since Korea, he said, has been good – “I have been exhausted, hungry, sleep-deprived, afraid, bored, unhappy. Been through cancer, pneumonia, lonely, whatever. I have also been happy, contented, enjoying my family and work, and so forth. No matter what, I have been alive.” He is now 86 years old “and buried too many friends; but I’m still here.”

“Basically, every day is a good day underneath. No matter what bad happened in 2013, there is always a chance – hope — that things will get better.”

Mr. Blair’s note reminded me of one of my favorite lines from a movie I saw as a kid, “The Long Hot Summer.” Cantankerous old Will Varner, played by Orson Welles, is rocking on the back porch. His children are finally romantically squared away, his worries in that area are over. He blurts out in a burly southern drawl, with an air of discovery, “It’s GOOD to be alive.”